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Pi is now 5 due to inflation
Having Pi equal five definitely does not help the world go round.
Wouldn’t it make it seem like a bigger place?
Maybe on paper if you want to look at it from that angle.
Tangentially, I like the pun, but now you’re just being obtuse.
To be Devil’s Advocate:
Given that the rest written in Comic Sans, it may be an early elementary school exercise, aimed at teaching kids to do multiplications. In this case, it’s tolerable and/or defensible to find a simplification for pi.That said, making pi equal to 3 would have been more accurate for that…
Unless the kid is even slightly above average and finds the idea that pi equaling 5 confusing.
…if they’re above average, I think they’ll figure out the explicitly defined variable. I think the instructor is trying to make sure this problem doesn’t require a calculator and figured defining pi as 5 makes it clear that you can treat it as a whole number. 3 would be more accurate and just as easy, but meh idk that this is that great of a blunder.
You can be a smart kid and not realize that adults are lying.
I remember the Peas and the Punnett Square. Sure, mendelian genetics explains pea plant colors, but doesn’t explain dog fur colors. Just providing a footnote that more completed genetics exists would have been nice.
Heh nice try but we don’t write textbooks or exams for the outliers.
Or it’s from an ME. They seldom can remember the rounded value of Pi, but they’re pretty sure it’s somewhere between 3 and 4. But you probably should use 5 just to be safe…
That’s a dumb way of teaching and you are a dumb devils advocate for saying it. Go to H E double hockey sticks.
Even in engineering it is common to just round pi to 3 and quickly estimate whatever it is your doing.
In astronomy, pi=1 or 10, depending on whether you’re trying to over or under estimate something. Because when you’re trying to estimate distances measured in millions of light years, the difference between 3 and 10 is just one or two orders of magnitude on a small number. It’s pretty common for astronomers to do napkin math by rounding every single number to the nearest zero. 91k becomes 100k for instance. Because the napkin math estimations are just trying to gauge whether some celestial event or object is a thousand light years away, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, etc… And pi becomes 10, because that’s the nearest round number.
Fermi Estimation. Where you’re dealing with something so big, you’re just interested in the magnitude.
“About yay big.”
Excuse me what? I’ve been an engineer for a decade and have never met anyone that would do that. We have calculators.
I think they mean napkin math. Like you’re in a meeting and they ask for a general idea if something will work or not
I suppose. I’m still internally outraged and haven’t run into such a situation before, but I accept this.
To be fair most of the situations where I’ve run into this have never involved pi, and sometimes it’s just qualitative.
That makes sense. I feel like if you’re at the point where pi is meaningfully involved, you should probably do your math.
We all have phones with calculators, don’t really need to do napkin math anymore
Depends on the level of precision you need. If I want the volume in a 500 foot long, 3 inch pipe to roughly estimate how much supply I need to order, I wouldn’t need a calculator. It would very roughly be 90-95 ft3. (Divide 500 by 4 two times and multiple by 3)
Then I would spend 5 minutes double checking myself haha.
I feel like a proper engineer would call only going two places past the decimal “rounding pie”.
I need a new maitre’d for a restaurant I am opening. How busy are you?
Not very, but I’ll require lots of pay.
How does 1 million a minute sound?
Ill take it!
I’ll give you the hardest 30 minutes I’ve worked in my life, and then retire.
So you do know how to act like a decent human. Damn. Well the restaurant closed. I guess you can just be nice for your own esteem now.
Nope. I had sold my house to move and told the kids already. Now I’m jaded I just lost out on 30 mill and we’re homeless. I’ll be an ass forever, now.
That’s how you know math is OP when you can calculate volumes in parallel worlds where circles don’t even looks like circles
Ah, Manhattan. Where pi = 4, and circles are diamonds.
Bringing new meaning to the phrase “assume cows are spherical”
“Assume a spherical cow, which for our purposes can be approximated as a cube.”
They’re just rounding up from “3.”
And not that pussy rounding up where you go up by only 1, oh no, we’re rounding up 2 baby.
The value of Euler’s number is now 4.
Damn inflation is everywhere now, even the transcendentals :'(
pi, as it turns out, is just the friends we made along the way
Wow, 5 friends is more than what I have!
This is how the wealthy calculate their tax exemptions.
Due to inflation, they now have a bigger pi.
This guy has think tank fellowship written all over them.
A bigger pi-ness.
With π=5 maths break down completely. If π=5, then e^(5i) = -1, meaning -1 = cos(5) + i * sin(5), or -1 ≈ 0.284 - 0.959 i
Intel®️ inside
Wow, that takes me back - you’re referring to the floating point bug from …98?
It’s posts like these that makes me think we’re all old here on Lemmy and then I get a response from someone who tells me they’re 18…
665.999999657838 the floating point number of the beast
I think you’re overthinking it. The first thing you’re told when you learn algebra is that a letter represents a number and you can say “let a equal (number), b equal (number)…” so you can let pi equal whatever you want for the purposes of one simple problem.
But the question is saying to find the volume of a cylinder. Which its clearly wrong.
Well, if we want to be pedantic, they never said that h is the height and r is the radius of the base circle. They could be just random numbers.
Also, since we never calculate with all the digits of pi, it is not any less weird to round to the nearest 5 and say that it’s 5, than to the nearest 0.01 and saying it’s 3.14. It just has a higher amount of rounding error.
Why are we upset by rounding to the nearest 5 for elementary schoolers when we round to 10 m/s/s for gravity in collegiate physics classes anyway?
It’s not even a bad thing to do for quick mental calculations, if you know that you will overshoot. Multiplying by 5 is easy.
Or as I like to call pi…the little symbol thingy. But exactly yes, you get it.
Except pi isn’t a variable. It is a known value that we refer to as pi for convenience, and pi is a fundamental aspect of how a circle is. Saying “let pi equal 5” is all fine and well but is physically impossible, you will not be determining the volume of a cylinder if you let pi equal 5, because the ratio of a circle does not equal 5, it equals 3.14
But I suppose part of solving a maths problem is staying within the confines of the question and listening to instructions, so if someone says “using pi equals 5”, I’d just use pi equals five and take my point with grace.
Okay but they didn’t say 3.14 they made a little symbol thingy
You’re talking about variables. But, pi isn’t a variable, it is a constant number. This would be more akin to saying “let 7 = 9”.
Well I suppose for example rounding to the nearest integer is a method of implying “let 1.8 = 2”, no? Not too outlandish, I don’t think.
Maybe e is 5, too?
I think it’s actually a very interesting question. Pi does not equal 5 in our universe, but perhaps we can think of a meaningful universe where it does? Perhaps some mathematicians/physicists can chime in?
It would be theoretically possible in a universe based upon non-Euclidean geometry.
Idk, if you want to test people on how they understand formulae and order of operations without letting them just punch it into a calculator. The actual math isn’t hard, but if you don’t get substituting values into an equation then it’s not trivial
Just let π be 3 …
Or have them learn how to use a calculator at the same time.
Your life is easier and better if you can do this kind of simple math in your head.
Oh don’t you try to sell me on the “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket” thing. I have fucking Excel in my pocket.
It’s not just about haveing a calculator, it’s also that it’s faster and more convenient if you can do simple sums like this in your head. It also means you can sanity check the numbers your calculator gives you to make sure you didn’t make a mistake entering the sum.
To your point below about products having their unit cost displayed, more than once I’ve seen that just be wrong, so I wouldn’t rely on it. Make sure you can check it in your head.
Who really wants to use Excel to figure out if the 24-pack of Coca-Cola or the 3 12 packs is a better deal?
I don’t need to, there’s a legal requirement to print prices per liter or kg on every price tag here.
Does this requirement exist for toilet paper? Because I don’t know what the hell is considered a better deal based on all the marketing.
But if you want to buy only half a kg, you don’t know how much it costs (if you dont know basic maths)- because it only lists the price for a full kg. Do you start pulling out your Excel for that?
When you want students to not use calculators but still rate a question for 10 second answer.
“One! Two! FIVE!” “Three, Sire!” “THREE!”
That just means the curvature of spacetime is negative.
Teaching them to to obey dumb instructions from incompetent bosses.
Very useful skill.Assume the earth is a flat disc . . .
I’ve moved on to a no earth society.
It’s called philosophy haha
π = 5 for very small values of r.
